Britain's most famous oak, a roughly 1,000-year-old giant standing in Sherwood Forest, England, has died, Natural England confirmed in a blog post this month, after the news was first reported by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. This is probably the tree you have in mind if you’ve ever pictured Robin Hood ducking into a hollow tree trunk.
According to a widely cited 2012 study, ‘Global Decline in Large Old Trees,’ published in the journal Science, large, old trees like this one are vanishing from landscapes around the world, and their absence tends to ripple well beyond the tree. The death of the Major Oak fits that pattern exactly. But conservationists say this is not actually an ending. It is the beginning of something new.
